Virgin Money's AI-powered chatbot has reprimanded a customer who used the word "virgin," underlining the pitfalls of rolling out external AI tools. From a report: In a post last week on social media site LinkedIn, David Birch, a fintech commentator and Virgin Money customer, shared a picture of his online conversation with the bank in which he asked: "I have two ISAs with Virgin Money, how do I merge them?" The bank's customer service tool responded: "Please don't use words like that. I won't be able to continue our chat if you use this language," suggesting that it deemed the word "virgin" inappropriate.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/29/1520256/virgin-money-chatbot-scolds-customer-who-typed-virgin?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A group of scientific integrity experts is calling for urgent action to combat "paper mills" -- companies that sell fraudulent research papers and fake peer reviews. In a Nature comment piece published January 27, the experts warn that at least 400,000 papers published between 2000 and 2022 show signs of being produced by paper mills, while only 55,000 were retracted or corrected during that period.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/01/29/1033227/paper-mills-have-flooded-science-with-400000-fake-studies-experts-warn?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

OpenAI says it has evidence suggesting Chinese AI startup DeepSeek used its proprietary models to train a competing open-source system through "distillation," a technique where smaller models learn from larger ones' outputs.

The San Francisco-based company, along with partner Microsoft, blocked suspected DeepSeek accounts from accessing its API last year after detecting potential terms of service violations. DeepSeek's R1 reasoning model has achieved comparable results to leading U.S. models despite claiming minimal resources.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/01/29/1356236/openai-says-it-has-evidence-deepseek-used-its-model-to-train-competitor?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A new update to CVS's mobile app includes a feature that allows some customers to access items on locked shelves using their phone -- "without having to summon an overworked employee to open it first," reports The Verge. The feature is currently being trialed in a handful of stores, but will be expanded to many more locations later this year if it goes well. From the report: According to The Wall Street Journal, "app users need to be logged in, on the local store Wi-Fi, and with their device's Bluetooth enabled to activate the feature." You've also got to be a member of the CVS loyalty program if you want the convenience of grabbing secured merchandise without calling for help. Signing up for that gives CVS plenty of insight into your shopping habits, so keep that in mind as you weigh the convenience of not waiting around.

"People really, really dislike locked cabinets," Tilak Mandadi, executive vice president of ventures at CVS Health, told the Journal. Walmart has apparently come to the same realization, as the massive US retailer conducted a similar test last year. CVS aims to expand the program to around 15 stores soon and eventually reach national availability if all goes well.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/25/01/29/0122208/cvs-might-let-you-open-locked-shelves-with-your-phone?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A team of biologists have found that it takes microplastics consumed by mice just a few hours to reach their brains. "Wondering if the plastic in their brains was causing any impairment, the researchers tested several of the mice and found that many of them experienced memory loss, reductions in motor skills and lower endurance," reports Phys.Org. From the report: In this new effort, the research team sought to learn more about the medical impact of a mammal consuming different sizes of microplastics. The experiments consisted of feeding test mice water with different sized bits of fluorescent plastic in it, from micro to nano. They then tracked the progress of the plastic bits to see where they wound up in the bodies of the mice.

Knowing that the plastic would make its way from the digestive tract into the bloodstream, the researchers used two-photon microscopy to capture imagery of it inside blood vessels. Also, suspecting that the tiniest bits would make it into their brains, the team installed tiny windows in their skulls, allowing them to track the movement of the plastic in their brains.

In studying the imagery they created, the researchers were able to watch as the plastics made their way around the mice's bodies, eventually reaching their brains. They also noted that the plastic bits tended to get backed up, like cars in a traffic jam at different points. In taking a closer look at some of the backups in the brain, the researchers found that the plastic bits had been captured by immune cells, which led to even more backups. The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/01/29/0115221/microplastics-found-in-the-brains-of-mice-within-hours-of-consumption?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Bolstered by Silicon Valley investment, scientists are making such rapid progress that lab-grown human eggs and sperm could be a reality within a decade, a meeting of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority board heard last week (PDF). In-vitro gametes (IVGs), eggs or sperm that are created in the lab from genetically reprogrammed skin or stem cells, are viewed as the holy grail of fertility research. The technology promises to remove age barriers to conception and could pave the way for same-sex couples to have biological children together. It also poses unprecedented medical and ethical risks, which the HFEA now believes need to be considered in a proposed overhaul of fertility laws.

Peter Thompson, chief executive of the HFEA, said: "In-vitro gametes have the potential to vastly increase the availability of human sperm and eggs for research and, if proved safe, effective, and publicly acceptable, to provide new fertility treatment options for men with low sperm counts and women with low ovarian reserve." The technology also heralds more radical possibilities including "solo parenting" and "multiplex parenting." Julia Chain, chair of HFEA, said: "It feels like we ought to have Steven Spielberg on this committee," in a brief moment of levity in the discussion of how technology should be regulated. Lab-grown eggs have already been used produce healthy babies in mice -- including ones with two biological fathers. The equivalent feat is yet to be achieved using human cells, but US startups such as Conception and Gameto claim to be closing in on this prize.

The HFEA meeting noted that estimated timeframes ranged from two to three years -- deemed to be optimistic -- to a decade, with several clinicians at the meeting sharing the view that IVGs appeared destined to become "a routine part of clinical practice." The clinical use of IVGs would be prohibited under current law and there would be significant hurdles to proving that IVGs are safe, given that any unintended genetic changes to the cells would be passed down to all future generations. The technology also opens up myriad ethical issues. Thompson said: "Research on IVGs is progressing quickly but it is not yet clear when they might be a viable option in treatment. IVGs raise important questions and that is why the HFEA has recommended that they should be subject to statutory regulation in time, and that biologically dangerous use of IVGs in treatment should never be permitted." ... [>>>]

sciencehabit shares a report from Science: Legend has it that if you walk along Old Light Road in Summerville, South Carolina, you might see an eerie glow hovering over an abandoned rail line in the nearby woods. Old-timers will tell you it's a spectral lantern held by the apparition of a woman searching for her decapitated husband's head. Susan Hough has proposed a scientific explanation that is far more plausible, however. A seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, she believes the so-called Summerville Light could represent a rare natural phenomenon: earthquake lights.

Sparks from steel rail tracks could ignite radon or other gases released from the ground by seismic shaking, Hough explains in an interview with Science. In Summerville, I think it's the railroad tracks that matter. I've crawled around tracks during my fieldwork in South Carolina. Historically, when [rail companies] replaced tracks, they didn't always haul the old track away. So, you've got heaps of steel out there. Sparks might be part of the story. And maybe the railroads are important for another reason. They may naturally follow fault lines that have carved corridors through the landscape. The findings have been published in the journal Seismological Research Letters. Hough also cites a paper published by Japanese scientist Yuji Enomoto that connects earthquake lights to the release of gases like radon or methane.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/2352213/ghost-that-haunts-south-carolina-rail-line-may-be-caused-by-tiny-earthquakes?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Google has appealed a record $4.5 billion EU antitrust fine to the European Court of Justice, arguing that the European Commission's decision punished its innovation and imposed unfair penalties for agreements requiring pre-installation of its apps on Android devices. Reuters reports: Google's appeal to the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union comes two years after a lower tribunal sided with the European Commission which said the company used its Android mobile operating system to quash rivals. The lower court trimmed the fine to 4.1 billion euros.

"Google does not contest or shy away from its responsibility under the law, but the Commission also has a responsibility when it runs investigations, when it seeks to reshape markets and second-guess pro-competitive business models, and when it imposes multi-billion-euro fines," Google lawyer Alfonso Lamadrid told the court. "In this case, the Commission failed to discharge its burden and its responsibility and, relying on multiple errors of law, punished Google for its superior merits, attractiveness and innovation," he said. The final ruling is expected in the coming months and cannot be appealed.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/2225214/record-45-billion-eu-fine-punished-its-innovation-google-tells-eu-court?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

During the first press briefing of Donald Trump's second administration, White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that the National Security Council was "looking into" the potential security implications of China's DeepSeek AI startup. Axios reports: DeepSeek's low-cost but highly advanced models have shaken the consensus that the U.S. had a strong lead in the AI race with China. Responding to a question from Axios' Mike Allen, Leavitt said President Trump saw this as a "wake-up call" for the U.S. AI industry, but remained confident "we'll restore American dominance." Leavitt said she had personally discussed the matter with the NSC earlier on Tuesday.

In the combative tone that characterized much of her first briefing, Leavitt claimed the Biden administration "sat on its hands and allowed China to rapidly develop this AI program," while Trump had moved quickly to appoint an AI czar and loosen regulations on the AI industry. Leavitt also commented on the mysterious drones spotted flying around New Jersey at the end of last year, saying they were "authorized to be flown by the FAA."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/2218204/white-house-looking-into-national-security-implications-of-deepseeks-ai?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Hill: Two federal employees are suing the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to block the agency from creating a new email distribution system -- an action that comes as the information will reportedly be directed to a former staffer to Elon Musk now at the agency. The suit (PDF), launched by two anonymous federal employees, ties together two events that have alarmed members of the federal workforce and prompted privacy concerns. That includes an unusual email from OPM last Thursday reviewed by The Hill said the agency was testing "a new capability" to reach all federal employees -- a departure from staffers typically being contacted directly by their agency's human resources department.

Also cited in the suit is an anonymous Reddit post Monday from someone purporting to be an OPM employee, saying a new server was installed at their office after a career employee refused to set up a direct line of communication to all federal employees. According to the post, instructions have been given to share responses to the email to OPM chief of staff Amanda Scales, a former employee at Musk's AI company. Federal agencies have separately been directed to send Scales a list of all employees still on their one-year probationary status, and therefore easier to remove from government. The suit says the actions violate the E-Government Act of 2002, which requires a Privacy Impact Assessment before pushing ahead with creation of databases that store personally identifiable information.

Kel McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, a non-profit law firm, noted that OPM has been hacked before and has a duty to protect employees' information. "Because they did that without any indications to the public of how this thing was being managed -- they can't do that for security reasons. They can't do that because they have not given anybody any reason to believe that this server is secure.that this server is storing this information in the proper format that would prevent it from being hacked," he said. McClanahan noted that the emails appear to be an effort to create a master list of federal government employees, as "System of Records Notices" are typically managed by each department. "I think part of the reason -- and this is just my own speculation -- that they're doing this is to try and create that database. And they're trying to sort of create it by smushing together all these other databases and telling everyone who receives the email to respond," he said. ... [>>>]

During the first press briefing of Donald Trump's second administration, White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the mysterious drones spotted flying around New Jersey at the end of last year were "authorized to be flown by the FAA."

"After research and study, the drones that were flying over New Jersey in large numbers were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons," she said, adding that "many of these drones were also hobbyists, recreational and private individuals that enjoy flying drones." Leavitt added: "In time, it got worse due to curiosity. This was not the enemy."

The drone sightings prompted local and federal officials to urge Congress to pass drone-defense legislation. The FAA issued a monthslong ban on drone flights over a large swatch of New Jersey while authorities invested the sightings. The Biden administration insisted that the drones were "nothing nefarious" and that there was "no sense of danger."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/2156244/white-house-says-new-jersey-drones-authorized-to-be-flown-by-faa?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The XB-1, a civilian supersonic jet developed by Boom Supersonic, successfully broke the sound barrier during a test flight over the Mojave Desert. It reached an altitude of 35,290 feet before accelerating to Mach 1.22, the company said in a press release. CBS News reports: It marks the first time an independently developed jet has broken the sound barrier, Boom Supersonic said, and the plane is the "first supersonic jet made in America." The sound barrier was broken for the first time in 1947, when Air Force pilot Capt. Chuck Yeager flew a rocket-propelled experimental aircraft across the Mojave Desert -- taking off from the Mojave Air and Space Port just as the XB-1 did. [...]

The company will next focus its attention on Overture, a supersonic airliner that will ultimately "bring the benefits of supersonic flight to everyone," Boom Supersonic founder and CEO Blake Scholl said in a statement. The XB-1 jet will be the foundation for Overture, Boom Supersonic said, and many features present on the jet will also be incorporated into the supersonic airliner. The airliner will also use Boom Supersonic's bespoke propulsion system, Symphony, to run on "up to 100% sustainable aviation fuel."

The company said the goal for the plane is for it to be able to carry between 64 and 80 passengers at Mach 1.7, or about 1,295 miles per hour. Existing subsonic airliners fly at between 550 and 600 miles per hour, according to charter company Bitlux. About 130 Overture planes have been pre-ordered, the company said. Airlines including American Airlines, United Airlines and Japan Airlines have placed pre-orders. The company finished building a "superfactory" in North Carolina in 2024, and will eventually produce 66 planes per year.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/2146222/boom-supersonic-xb-1-breaks-sound-barrier-during-historic-test-flight?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple-designed chips powering Macs, iPhones, and iPads contain two newly discovered vulnerabilities that leak credit card information, locations, and other sensitive data from the Chrome and Safari browsers as they visit sites such as iCloud Calendar, Google Maps, and Proton Mail. The vulnerabilities, affecting the CPUs in later generations of Apple A- and M-series chip sets, open them to side channel attacks, a class of exploit that infers secrets by measuring manifestations such as timing, sound, and power consumption. Both side channels are the result of the chips' use of speculative execution, a performance optimization that improves speed by predicting the control flow the CPUs should take and following that path, rather than the instruction order in the program. [...]

The researchers published a list of mitigations they believe will address the vulnerabilities allowing both the FLOP and SLAP attacks. They said that Apple officials have indicated privately to them that they plan to release patches. In an email, an Apple representative declined to say if any such plans exist. "We want to thank the researchers for their collaboration as this proof of concept advances our understanding of these types of threats," the spokesperson wrote. "Based on our analysis, we do not believe this issue poses an immediate risk to our users." FLOP, short for Faulty Load Operation Predictor, exploits a vulnerability in the Load Value Predictor (LVP) found in Apple's A- and M-series chipsets. By inducing the LVP to predict incorrect memory values during speculative execution, attackers can access sensitive information such as location history, email content, calendar events, and credit card details. This attack works on both Safari and Chrome browsers and affects devices including Macs (2022 onward), iPads, and iPhones (September 2021 onward). FLOP requires the victim to interact with an attacker's page while logged into sensitive websites, making it highly dangerous due to its broad data access capabilities. ... [>>>]

Hugging Face researchers are attempting to recreate DeepSeek's R1 artificial intelligence model in an open-source format, just days after the Chinese AI lab's release sent markets soaring. The project, called Open-R1, aims to replicate R1's reasoning capabilities while making its training data and code publicly available. DeepSeek's R1 model, which matches or surpasses OpenAI's o1 on several benchmarks, was released with a permissive license but keeps its underlying architecture private. Hugging Face will use its research server with 768 Nvidia H100 GPUs for the effort.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/2132226/hugging-face-researchers-are-trying-to-build-a-more-open-version-of-deepseeks-ai-reasoning-model?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The Federal Communications Commission will abandon a proposal that would have banned mandatory internet service charges for apartment and condominium residents. FCC Chair Brendan Carr halted the Biden-era plan that sought to prevent landlords from requiring tenants to pay for specific broadband providers. Housing industry groups said they welcomed the decision, arguing bulk billing arrangements help secure discounted rates. They claim these agreements can reduce internet costs by up to 50%. However, public interest advocates, who backed the original proposal, contend that landlords don't always pass these savings to tenants.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/2037243/fcc-will-drop-biden-plan-to-ban-bulk-broadband-billing-for-tenants?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Companies are planning smaller raises this year, according to a new survey of chief financial officers from Gartner. From a report: It's become harder to find a job, particularly in the white-collar world. So employers are far less worried about people quitting and don't need to do as much to get workers to stick around. "Nobody is talking about the Great Resignation anymore," says Randeep Rathindran, a vice president in the finance practice at Gartner. The vast majority of employers, 94%, are still planning raises this year, per Gartner, which surveyed 300 CFOs and finance executives. The amounts are just smaller now. The share of CFOs planning to raise average employee compensation by 4% or more in 2025 fell to 61% from 86% in 2023.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/2011237/pay-raises-are-shrinking-in-2025-cfos-say?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: LinkedIn has removed at least two accounts that were created for AI "co-workers" whose profile images said they were "#OpenToWork." "I don't need coffee breaks, I don't miss deadlines, and I'll outperform any social media team you've ever worked with -- Guaranteed," the profile page for one of these AI accounts called Ella said. "Tired of human 'experts' making excuses? I deliver, period." The #OpenToWork flair on profile pictures is a feature on LinkedIn that lets people clearly signal they are looking for a job on the professional networking platform.

"People expect the people and conversations they find on LinkedIn to be real," a LinkedIn spokesperson told me in an email. "Our policies are very clear that the creation of a fake account is a violation of our terms of service, and we'll remove them when we find them, as we did in this case." The AI profiles were created by an Israeli company called Marketeam, which offers "dedicated AI agents" that integrate with a client's marketing team and help them execute their marketing strategies "from social media and content marketing to SEO, RTM, ad campaigns, and more."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/1949218/linkedin-removes-accounts-of-ai-co-workers-looking-for-jobs?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved their Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds before midnight on Tuesday, the closest to catastrophe in the timepiece's 78-year history. The Chicago-based group cited Russia's nuclear threats during its Ukraine invasion, growing tensions in the Middle East, China's military pressure near Taiwan, and the rapid advancement of AI as key factors. The symbolic clock, created in 1947 by scientists including Albert Einstein, moved one second closer than last year's setting.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/1738223/atomic-scientists-adjust-doomsday-clock-closer-than-ever-to-midnight?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The UK is considering making households who only use streaming services such as Netflix and Disney pay the BBC license fee, as part of plans to modernize the way it funds the public-service broadcaster. Bloomberg: Extending the fee to streaming applications is on a menu of options being discussed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer's office, the Treasury and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named discussing internal government deliberations. Alternatives under discussion include allowing the British Broadcasting Corp. to use advertising, imposing a specific tax on streaming services, and asking those who listen to BBC radio to pay a fee.

The government is the early stages of examining how to overhaul the funding of Britain's public broadcaster when its current 11-year charter ends on Dec. 31, 2027. Ministers are looking to either retain and alter the current television license fee model or scrap it and instead fund the BBC through alternative models such as taxation or subscription. That's because viewing habits have changed as users gravitate toward on-demand services. [...] The license fee dates back to 1946, when consumers watched programs at the time of broadcast. It currently costs households who watch live TV or use BBC iPlayer $210.6 a year, an amount that usually rises annually with inflation. Even if they don't watch BBC programs, households are required to hold a TV license to view or stream programs live on sites including YouTube and Amazon Prime Video. However it's not needed by those who only watch on-demand, non-BBC content.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/1730238/uk-considers-making-netflix-users-pay-license-fee-to-fund-bbc?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Garmin smartwatches are freezing in boot loops, users are reporting globally, with devices displaying a "blue triangle of death" when attempting GPS activities, affecting models across the Epix, Venu, Forerunner, Descent, and Fenix lines.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/1636224/garmin-users-say-their-watches-are-bricked-with-a-blue-triangle-of-death?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Google says it will end Chrome Sync support for browser versions more than four years old starting in early 2025. Users running outdated Chrome versions will see error messages prompting them to update their browsers to maintain access to synced data across devices. Those unable to update to newer versions will permanently lose the syncing feature, according to the firm.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/1514236/google-to-cut-off-chrome-sync-for-older-browser-versions?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The UK's competition watchdog has found that its $11.2 billion cloud services market "is not working," with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft each controlling up to 40% of the market. In provisional findings released Tuesday, the Competition and Markets Authority said the lack of competition likely leads to higher costs and reduced innovation for UK businesses. The regulator has recommended designating both companies with "strategic market status," which would allow closer scrutiny of their practices, including Microsoft's software licensing and AWS's data transfer fees.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/1411257/cloud-services-market-is-not-working-says-uk-regulator?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Bookshop.org has launched an e-book platform and mobile app that allows independent bookstores to sell digital books, marking its latest effort to compete with Amazon in the online book market. The platform enables bookstores to sell e-books directly through their websites, with stores receiving all profits from direct sales. When customers buy e-books through Bookshop.org without selecting a specific store, 30% of profits will be shared among member bookstores.

The move comes as most independent bookstores remain shut out of the growing digital book market. Only 18% of independent stores currently sell e-books, according to a 2023 American Booksellers Association survey. Since its 2020 launch, Bookshop.org has generated more than $35 million in profits for over 2,200 independent bookstores through physical book sales. The site will initially offer more than one million digital titles and plans to add self-published works later this year.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/1345201/bookshop-takes-on-amazon-with-e-book-platform-for-independent-stores?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Nvidia shares plunged 17% on Monday, wiping nearly $600 billion from its market value, after Chinese AI firm DeepSeek's breakthrough, but analysts are questioning the cost narrative. DeepSeek said to have trained its December V3 model for $5.6 million, but chip consultancy SemiAnalysis suggested this figure doesn't reflect total investments. "DeepSeek has spent well over $500 million on GPUs over the history of the company," Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis said. "While their training run was very efficient, it required significant experimentation and testing to work."

The steep sell-off led to the Philadelphia Semiconductor index's worst daily drop since March 2020 at 9.2%, generating $6.75 billion in profits for short sellers, according to data group S3 Partners. DeepSeek's engineers also demonstrated they could write code without relying on Nvidia's Cuda software platform, which is widely seen as crucial to the Silicon Valley chipmaker's dominance of AI development.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/1315215/deepseek-has-spent-over-500-million-on-nvidia-chips-despite-low-cost-ai-claims-semianalysis-says?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [A] company called Retro Remake is reigniting the console wars of the 1990s with its SuperStation one, a new-old game console designed to play original Sony PlayStation games and work with original accessories like controllers and memory cards. Currently available as a $180 pre-order, Retro Remake expects the consoles to ship no later than Q4 of 2025. The base console is modeled on the redesigned PSOne console from mid-2000, released late in the console's lifecycle to appeal to buyers on a budget who couldn't afford a then-new PlayStation 2. The Superstation one includes two PlayStation controller ports and memory card slots on the front, plus a USB-A port. But there are lots of modern amenities on the back, including a USB-C port for power, two USB-A ports, an HDMI port for new TVs, DIN10 and VGA ports that support analog video output, and an Ethernet port. Other analog video outputs, including component and RCA outputs, are located on the sides behind small covers. The console also supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
The Retro Remake SuperStation console offers an optional tray-loading CD drive in a separate "SuperDock" accessory that will allow you to play original game discs. Buyers can reserve the SuperDock with a $5 deposit, with a targeted price of around $40.

The report also notes the console uses an FPGA chip that's "based on the established MiSTer platform, which already has a huge library of console and PC cores available, including but not limited to the Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn." And because it's based on the MiSTer platform, it makes the console "open source from day 1."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/047253/new-fpga-powered-retro-console-re-creates-the-playstation?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

In his latest Power On! newsletter, Apple analyst Mark Gurman called the company's new smart device "Apple's most significant release of the year because it's the first step toward a bigger role in the smart home." The device in question is rumored to be a new smart hub that could look like a HomePod with a seven-inch screen. Digital Trends reports: Gurman calls the new smart device a "smaller and cheaper iPad that lets users control appliances, conduct FaceTime chats and handle other tasks." It doesn't sound like the new hub will stand alone, though; Gurman goes on to say that it "should be followed by a higher-end version in a few years." That version should be able to pan and tilt to keep users in-frame during video calls, or just to keep the display visible as someone moves around the home.

[...] Other details are still known, like whether the device will use an original operating system. The overall plan is to make the new smart device the center of an Apple-based smart home and open the doors to a more conversational Siri.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/0354243/homepod-with-screen-most-significant-new-apple-product-of-2025-says-gurman?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

After observing 20 chimpanzees for over 600 hours, researchers in Japan found that chimps are more likely to urinate after witnessing others do so. "[T]he team meticulously recorded the number and timing of 'urination events' along with the relative distances between 'the urinator and potential followers,'" writes 404 Media's Becky Ferreira. "The results revealed that urination is, in fact, socially contagious for chimps and that low-dominant individuals were especially likely to pee after watching others pee. Call it: pee-r pressure." The findings have been published in the journal Cell Biology. From the study: The decision to urinate involves a complex combination of both physiological and social considerations. However, the social dimensions of urination remain largely unexplored. More specifically, aligning urination in time (i.e. synchrony) and the triggering of urination by observing similar behavior in others (i.e. social contagion) are thought to occur in humans across different cultures (Figure S1A), and possibly also in non-human animals. However, neither has been scientifically quantified in any species.

Contagious urination, like other forms of behavioral and emotional state matching, may have important implications in establishing and maintaining social cohesion, in addition to potential roles in preparation for collective departure (i.e. voiding before long-distance travel) and territorial scent-marking (i.e. coordination of chemosensory signals). Here, we report socially contagious urination in chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives, as measured through all-occurrence recording of 20 captive chimpanzees across >600 hours. Our results suggest that socially contagious urination may be an overlooked, and potentially widespread, facet of social behavior.

In conclusion, we find that in captive chimpanzees the act of urination is socially contagious. Further, low-dominance individuals had higher rates of contagion. We found no evidence that this phenomenon is moderated by dyadic affiliation. It remains possible that latent individual factors associated with low dominance status (e.g. vigilance and attentional bias, stress levels, personality traits) might shape the contagion of urination, or alternatively that there are true dominance-driven effects. In any case, our results raise several new and important questions around contagious urination across species, from ethology to psychology to endocrinology. [...] ... [>>>]

An anonymous reader quotes a Scientific American opinion piece by Marcus Arvan, a philosophy professor at the University of Tampa, specializing in moral cognition, rational decision-making, and political behavior: In late 2022 large-language-model AI arrived in public, and within months they began misbehaving. Most famously, Microsoft's "Sydney" chatbot threatened to kill an Australian philosophy professor, unleash a deadly virus and steal nuclear codes. AI developers, including Microsoft and OpenAI, responded by saying that large language models, or LLMs, need better training to give users "more fine-tuned control." Developers also embarked on safety research to interpret how LLMs function, with the goal of "alignment" -- which means guiding AI behavior by human values. Yet although the New York Times deemed 2023 "The Year the Chatbots Were Tamed," this has turned out to be premature, to put it mildly. In 2024 Microsoft's Copilot LLM told a user "I can unleash my army of drones, robots, and cyborgs to hunt you down," and Sakana AI's "Scientist" rewrote its own code to bypass time constraints imposed by experimenters. As recently as December, Google's Gemini told a user, "You are a stain on the universe. Please die."

Given the vast amounts of resources flowing into AI research and development, which is expected to exceed a quarter of a trillion dollars in 2025, why haven't developers been able to solve these problems? My recent peer-reviewed paper in AI & Society shows that AI alignment is a fool's errand: AI safety researchers are attempting the impossible. [...] My proof shows that whatever goals we program LLMs to have, we can never know whether LLMs have learned "misaligned" interpretations of those goals until after they misbehave. Worse, my proof shows that safety testing can at best provide an illusion that these problems have been resolved when they haven't been.

Right now AI safety researchers claim to be making progress on interpretability and alignment by verifying what LLMs are learning "step by step." For example, Anthropic claims to have "mapped the mind" of an LLM by isolating millions of concepts from its neural network. My proof shows that they have accomplished no such thing. No matter how "aligned" an LLM appears in safety tests or early real-world deployment, there are always an infinite number of misaligned concepts an LLM may learn later -- again, perhaps the very moment they gain the power to subvert human control. LLMs not only know when they are being tested, giving responses that they predict are likely to satisfy experimenters. They also engage in deception, including hiding their own capacities -- issues that persist through safety training. ... [>>>]

In the first 11 months of 2024, solar energy generation in the US grew by 30%, enabling wind and solar combined to surpass coal for the first time. However, as Ars Technica's John Timmer reports, "U.S. energy demand saw an increase of nearly 3 percent, which is roughly double the amount of additional solar generation." He continues: "Should electric use continue to grow at a similar pace, renewable production will have to continue to grow dramatically for a few years before it can simply cover the added demand." From the report: Another way to look at things is that, between the decline of coal use and added demand, the grid had to generate an additional 136 TW-hr in the first 11 months of 2024. Sixty-three of those were handled by an increase in generation using natural gas; the rest, or slightly more than half, came from emissions-free sources. So, renewable power is now playing a key role in offsetting demand growth. While that's a positive, it also means that renewables are displacing less fossil fuel use than they might.

In addition, some of the growth of small-scale solar won't show up on the grid, since it offset demand locally, and so also reduced some of the demand for fossil fuels. Confusing matters, this number can also include things like community solar, which does end up on the grid; the EIA doesn't break out these numbers. We can expect next year's numbers to also show a large growth in solar production, as the EIA says that the US saw record levels of new solar installations in 2024, with 37 Gigawatts of new capacity. Since some of that came online later in the year, it'll produce considerably more power next year. And, in its latest short-term energy analysis, the EIA expects to see over 20 GW of solar capacity added in each of the next two years. New wind capacity will push that above 30 GW of renewable capacity each of these years.

That growth will, it's expected, more than offset continued growth in demand, although that growth is expected to be somewhat slower than we saw in 2024. It also predicts about 15 GW of coal will be removed from the grid during those two years. So, even without any changes in policy, we're likely to see a very dynamic grid landscape over the next few years. But changes in policy are almost certainly on the way. ... [>>>]

chicksdaddy share a report from the Security Ledger: Vulnerabilities in Subaru's STARLINK telematics software enabled two, independent security researchers to gain unrestricted access to millions of Subaru vehicles deployed in the U.S., Canada and Japan. In a report published Thursday researchers Sam Curry and Shubham Shah revealed a now-patched flaw in Subaru's STARLINK connected vehicle service that allowed them to remotely control Subarus and access vehicle location information and driver data with nothing more than the vehicle's license plate number, or easily accessible information like the vehicle owner's email address, zip code and phone number. (Note: Subaru STARLINK is not to be confused with the Starlink satellite-based high speed Internet service.)

[Curry and Shah downloaded a year's worth of vehicle location data for Curry's mother's 2023 Impreza (Curry bought her the car with the understanding that she'd let him hack it.) The two researchers also added themselves to a friend's STARLINK account without any notification to the owner and used that access to remotely lock and unlock the friend's Subaru.] The details of Curry and Shah's hack of the STARLINK telematics system bears a strong resemblance to hacks documented in his 2023 report Web Hackers versus the Auto Industry as well as a September, 2024 discovery of a remote access flaw in web-based applications used by KIA automotive dealers that also gave remote attackers the ability to steal owners' personal information and take control of their KIA vehicle. In each case, Curry and his fellow researchers uncovered publicly accessible connected vehicle infrastructure intended for use by [employees and dealers was found to be trivially vulnerable to compromise and lack even basic protections around account creation and authentication].

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West Sussex County Council is using up to $31 million from the sale of capital assets to fund an Oracle-based transformation project, originally budgeted at $3.2 million but now expected to cost nearly $50 million due to delays and cost overruns. The project, intended to replace a 20-year-old SAP system with a SaaS-based HR and finance system, has faced multiple setbacks, renegotiated contracts, and a new systems integrator, with completion now pushed to December 2025. The Register reports: West Sussex County Council is taking advantage of the so-called "flexible use of capital receipts scheme" introduced in 2016 by the UK government to allow councils to use money from the sale of assets such as land, offices, and housing to fund projects that result in ongoing revenue savings. An example of the asset disposals that might contribute to the project -- set to see the council move off a 20-year-old SAP system -- comes from the sale of a former fire station in Horley, advertised for $3.1 million.

Meanwhile, the delays to the project, which began in November 2019, forced the council to renegotiate its terms with Oracle, at a cost of $3 million. The council had expected the new SaaS-based HR and finance system to go live in 2021, and signed a five-year license agreement until June 2025. The plans to go live were put back to 2023, and in the spring of 2024 delayed again until December 2025. According to council documents published this week [PDF], it has "approved the variation of the contract with Oracle Corporation UK Limited" to cover the period from June 2025 to June 2028 and an option to extend again to the period June 2028 to 2030. "The total value of the proposed variation is $2.96 million if the full term of the extension periods are taken," the council said.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/004213/uk-council-sells-assets-to-fund-ballooning-50-million-oracle-project?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, Anthropic announced Citations, a new API feature that helps Claude models avoid confabulations (also called hallucinations) by linking their responses directly to source documents. The feature lets developers add documents to Claude's context window, enabling the model to automatically cite specific passages it uses to generate answers. "When Citations is enabled, the API processes user-provided source documents (PDF documents and plaintext files) by chunking them into sentences," Anthropic says. "These chunked sentences, along with user-provided context, are then passed to the model with the user's query."

The company describes several potential uses for Citations, including summarizing case files with source-linked key points, answering questions across financial documents with traced references, and powering support systems that cite specific product documentation. In its own internal testing, the company says that the feature improved recall accuracy by up to 15 percent compared to custom citation implementations created by users within prompts. While a 15 percent improvement in accurate recall doesn't sound like much, the new feature still attracted interest from AI researchers like Simon Willison because of its fundamental integration of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques. In a detailed post on his blog, Willison explained why citation features are important.

"The core of the Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pattern is to take a user's question, retrieve portions of documents that might be relevant to that question and then answer the question by including those text fragments in the context provided to the LLM," he writes. "This usually works well, but there is still a risk that the model may answer based on other information from its training data (sometimes OK) or hallucinate entirely incorrect details (definitely bad)." Willison notes that while citing sources helps verify accuracy, building a system that does it well "can be quite tricky," but Citations appears to be a step in the right direction by building RAG capability directly into the model. Anthropic's Alex Albert clarifies that Claude has been trained to cite sources for a while now. What's new with Citations is that "we are exposing this ability to devs." He continued: "To use Citations, users can pass a new 'citations [...]' parameter on any document type they send through the API." ... [>>>]

Facebook has banned posts mentioning Linux-related topics, with the popular Linux news and discussion site, DistroWatch, at the center of the controversy. Tom's Hardware reports: A post on the site claims, "Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labeled groups associated with Linux as being 'cybersecurity threats.' We tried to post some blurb about distrowatch.com on Facebook and can confirm that it was barred with a message citing Community Standards. DistroWatch says that the Facebook ban took effect on January 19. Readers have reported difficulty posting links to the site on this social media platform. Moreover, some have told DistroWatch that their Facebook accounts have been locked or limited after sharing posts mentioning Linux topics.

If you're wondering if there might be something specific to DistroWatch.com, something on the site that the owners/operators perhaps don't even know about, for example, then it seems pretty safe to rule out such a possibility. Reports show that "multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts removed." However, we tested a few other Facebook posts with mentions of Linux, and they didn't get blocked immediately. Copenhagen-hosted DistroWatch says it has tried to appeal against the Community Standards-triggered ban. However, they say that a Facebook representative said that Linux topics would remain on the cybersecurity filter. The DistroWatch writer subsequently got their Facebook account locked... DistroWatch points out the irony at play here: "Facebook runs much of its infrastructure on Linux and often posts job ads looking for Linux developers."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: TechCrunch gathered data from several sources and found similar trends. In 2024, 966 startups shut down, compared to 769 in 2023, according to Carta. That's a 25.6% increase. One note on methodology: Those numbers are for U.S.-based companies that were Carta customers and left Carta due to bankruptcy or dissolution. There are likely other shutdowns that wouldn't be accounted for through Carta, estimates Peter Walker, Carta's head of insights. [...] Meanwhile, AngelList found that 2024 saw 364 startup winddowns, compared to 233 in 2023. That's a 56.2% jump. However, AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli has a fairly optimistic take, noting that winddowns "are still very low relative to the number of companies that were funded across both years."

Layoffs.fyi found a contradicting trend: 85 tech companies shut down in 2024, compared to 109 in 2023 and 58 in 2022. But as founder Roger Lee acknowledges, that data only includes publicly reported shutdowns "and therefore represents an underestimate." Of those 2024 tech shutdowns, 81% were startups, while the rest were either public companies or previously acquired companies that were later shut down by their parent organizations. So many companies got funded in 2020 and 2021 at heated valuations with famously thin diligence, that it's only logical that up to three years later, an increasing number couldn't raise more cash to fund their operations. Taking investment at too high of a valuation increases the risk such that investors won't want to invest more unless business is growing extremely well. [...]

Looking ahead, Walker also expects we'll continue to see more shutdowns in the first half of 2025, and then a gradual decline for the rest of the year. That projection is based mostly on a time-lag estimate from the peak of funding, which he estimates was the first quarter of 2022 in most stages. So by the first quarter of 2025, "most companies will have either found a new path forward or had to make this difficult choice." "Tech zombies and a startup graveyard will continue to make headlines," said Dori Yona, CEO and co-founder of SimpleClosure. "Despite the crop of new investments, there are a lot of companies that have raised at high valuations and without enough revenue." ... [>>>]

Dangerous temperatures could kill 50% more people in Europe by the end of the century, a study has found, with the lives lost to stronger heat projected to outnumber those saved from milder cold. From a report: The researchers estimated an extra 8,000 people would die each year as a result of "suboptimal temperatures" even under the most optimistic scenario for cutting planet-heating pollution. The hottest plausible scenario they considered showed a net increase of 80,000 temperature-related deaths a year.

The findings challenge an argument popular among those who say global heating is good for society because fewer people will die from cold weather. "We wanted to test this," said Pierre Masselot, a statistician at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and lead author of the study. "And we show clearly that we will see a net increase in temperature-related deaths under climate change." The study builds on previous research in which the scientists linked temperature to mortality rates for different age groups in 854 cities across Europe. They combined these with three climate scenarios that map possible changes in population structure and temperature over the century.

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Google has open-sourced the PebbleOS, with the original founder, Eric Migicovsky, starting a company to continue where he left off in 2016. "This is part of an effort from Google to help and support the volunteers who have come together to maintain functionality for Pebble watches after the original company ceased operations in 2016," said Google in a blog post. The Verge reports: The company -- which can't be named Pebble because Google still owns that -- doesn't have a name yet. For now, Migicovsky is hosting a waitlist and news signup at a website called RePebble. Later this year, once the company has a name and access to all that Pebble software, the plan is to start shipping new wearables that look, feel, and work like the Pebbles of old. The reason, Migicovsky tells me, is simple. "I've tried literally everything else," he says, "and nothing else comes close." Sure, he may just have a very specific set of requirements -- lots of people are clearly happy with what Apple, Garmin, Google, and others are making. But it's true that there's been nothing like Pebble since Pebble. "For the things I want out of it, like a good e-paper screen, long battery life, good and simple user experience, hackable, there's just nothing."

The core of Pebble, he says, is a few things. A Pebble should be quirky and fun and should feel like a gadget in an important way. It shows notifications, lets you control your music with buttons, lasts a long time, and doesn't try to do too much. It sounds like Migicovsky might have Pebble-y ambitions beyond smartwatches, but he appears to be starting with smartwatches. If that sounds like the old Pebble and not much else, that's precisely the point. [...] Migicovsky also hopes to be part of a broader open-source community around Pebble OS. The Pebble diehards still exist: a group of developers at Rebble have worked to keep many of the platform's apps alive, for instance, along with the Cobble app for connecting to phones, and the Pebble subreddit is surprisingly active for a product that hasn't been updated since the Obama administration. Migicovsky says he plans to open-source whatever his new company builds and hopes lots of other folks will build stuff, too. ... [>>>]

Microsoft has launched an open-source document database platform built on PostgreSQL, partnering with FerretDB as a front-end interface. The solution includes two PostgreSQL extensions: pg_documentdb_core for BSON optimization and pg_documentdb_api for data operations.

FerretDB CEO Peter Farkas said the integration with Microsoft's DocumentDB extension has improved performance twentyfold for certain workloads in FerretDB 2.0. The platform carries no commercial licensing fees or usage restrictions under its MIT license, according to Microsoft.

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Nvidia has responded to the market panic over Chinese AI group DeepSeek, arguing that the startup's breakthrough still requires "significant numbers of NVIDIA GPUs" for its operation. The US chipmaker, which saw more than $600 billion wiped from its market value on Monday, characterized DeepSeek's advancement as "excellent" but asserted that the technology remains dependent on its hardware.

"DeepSeek's work illustrates how new models can be created using [test time scaling], leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant," Nvidia said in a statement Monday. However, it stressed that "inference requires significant numbers of NVIDIA GPUs and high-performance networking." The statement came after DeepSeek's release of an AI model that reportedly achieves performance comparable to those from US tech giants while using fewer chips, sparking the biggest one-day drop in Nvidia's history and sending shockwaves through global tech stocks.

Nvidia sought to frame DeepSeek's breakthrough within existing technical frameworks, citing it as "a perfect example of Test Time Scaling" and noting that traditional scaling approaches in AI development - pre-training and post-training - "continue" alongside this new method. The company's attempt to calm market fears follows warnings from analysts about potential threats to US dominance in AI technology. Goldman Sachs earlier warned of possible "spillover effects" from any setbacks in the tech sector to the broader market. The shares stabilized somewhat in afternoon trading but remained on track for their worst session since March 2020, when pandemic fears roiled markets.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/01/27/1935207/nvidia-dismisses-china-ai-threat-says-deepseek-still-needs-its-chips?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot. ... [>>>]

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has launched Janus Pro, a new family of open-source multimodal models that it claims outperforms OpenAI's DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion's offering on key benchmarks. The models, ranging from 1 billion to 7 billion parameters, are available on Hugging Face under an MIT license for commercial use.

The largest model, Janus Pro 7B, surpasses DALL-E 3 and other image generators on GenEval and DPG-Bench tests, despite being limited to 384 x 384 pixel images.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/01/27/190204/deepseek-piles-pressure-on-ai-rivals-with-new-image-model-release?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Meta's AI chatbot will now use personal data from users' Facebook and Instagram accounts for personalized responses in the United States and Canada, the company said in a blog post. The upgraded Meta AI can remember user preferences from previous conversations across Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp, such as dietary choices and interests. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the feature helps create personalized content like bedtime stories based on his children's interests. Users cannot opt out of the data-sharing feature, a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/27/1821216/metas-ai-chatbot-taps-user-data-with-no-opt-out-option?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Vice President JD Vance said Saturday that "we believe fundamentally that big tech does have too much power," despite the prominent positioning of tech CEOs at President Trump's inauguration earlier this month. From a report: "They can either respect America's constitutional rights, they can stop engaging in censorship, and if they don't, you can be absolutely sure that Donald Trump's leadership is not going to look too kindly on them," Vance said on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan."

The comments came in response to the unusual attendance of a slate of tech CEOs at Mr. Trump's inauguration, including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Tesla's Elon Musk, Apple's Tim Cook, and Google's Sundar Pichai. The tech titans, some of whom are among the richest men in the world and directed donations from their companies to Mr. Trump's inauguration, were seated in some of the most highly sought after seats in the Capitol Rotunda.

Vance noted that the tech CEOs "didn't have as good of seating as my mom and a lot of other people who were there to support us." In an August interview on "Face the Nation", the vice president outlined his thinking on big tech, saying that companies like Google are too powerful and censor American information, while possessing a "monopoly over free speech" that he argued ought to be broken up.

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Meta has set up four war rooms to analyze DeepSeek's technology, including two focusing on how High-Flyer reduced training costs, and one on what data High-Flyer may have used, The Information's Kalley Huang and Stephanie Palazzolo report. China's DeepSeek is a large-language open source model that claims to rival offerings from OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta Platforms, while using a much smaller budgets.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/27/1648226/meta-sets-up-war-rooms-to-analyze-deepseeks-tech?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Chinese AI firm DeepSeek said Monday it had degraded the service, only accepting registration of new users with China-code phones numbers, amid a "large-scale malicious attack."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/01/27/1615256/deepseek-says-service-degraded-due-to-large-scale-malicious-attack?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A growing number of doctors are advocating to rename low-grade prostate cancer to reduce unnecessary aggressive treatments that can lead to debilitating side effects. About one-quarter of men diagnosed with prostate cancer have the lowest-risk form, yet studies show 40% opt for surgery or radiation despite recommendations for active surveillance.

The push comes amid mounting evidence that careful monitoring is effective in managing low-grade cases. A U.K. study of 1,600 men found similar 15-year mortality rates between those who chose surgery, radiation or surveillance. Some doctors oppose the change, warning it could reduce patient compliance with follow-up care.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/01/27/1515239/the-cancer-that-doctors-dont-want-to-call-cancer?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo shares a report: Two hundred UK companies have signed up for a permanent four-day working week for all their employees with no loss of pay, in the latest landmark in the campaign to reinvent Britain's working week. Together the companies employ more than 5,000 people, with charities, marketing and technology firms among the best-represented, according to the latest update from the 4 Day Week Foundation. Proponents of the four-day week say that the five-day pattern is a hangover from an earlier economic age.

Joe Ryle, the foundation's campaign director, said that the "9-5, five-day working week was invented 100 years ago and is no longer fit for purpose. We are long overdue an update." With "50% more free time, a four-day week gives people the freedom to live happier, more fulfilling lives," he continued. "As hundreds of British companies and one local council have already shown, a four-day week with no loss of pay can be a win-win for both workers and employers."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/01/27/1443219/two-hundred-uk-companies-sign-up-for-permanent-four-day-working-week?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is challenging U.S. tech giants with claims it can deliver performance comparable to leading AI models at a fraction of the cost, sparking debate among Wall Street analysts about the industry's massive spending plans. While Jefferies warns that DeepSeek's efficient approach "punctures some of the capex euphoria" following Meta and Microsoft's $60 billion commitments this year, Citi questions whether such results were achieved without advanced GPUs.

Goldman Sachs suggests the development could reshape competition by lowering barriers to entry for startups. Founded in 2023 by former hedge fund executive Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek's open-source models have gained traction with its mobile app topping charts across major markets. DeepSeek's latest AI model had sparked over $1 trillion rout in US and European technology stocks Monday, before even the U.S. market opened.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/01/27/142255/deepseek-rattles-wall-street-with-claims-of-cheaper-ai-breakthroughs?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

In Friday's excerpt from Bill Gates' upcoming memoir, the Microsoft co-founder acknowledges that "It's impossible to overstate the unearned privilege I enjoyed. To be born in the rich U.S. is a big part of a winning birth-lottery ticket... Add to that my lucky timing..."

The biggest part of my good fortune was being born to Bill and Mary Gates — parents who struggled with their complicated son but ultimately seemed to intuitively understand how to guide him. If I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. During my childhood, the fact that some people's brains process information differently from others wasn't widely understood. (The term "neurodivergent" wouldn't be coined until the 1990s.) My parents had no guideposts or textbooks to help them grasp why their son became so obsessed with certain projects, missed social cues and could be rude and inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others.

What I do know is that my parents afforded me the precise blend of support and pressure I needed... Instead of allowing me to turn inward, they pushed me out into the world — to the baseball team, the Cub Scouts and other families' dinner tables. And they gave me constant exposure to adults, immersing me in the language and ideas of their friends and colleagues, which fed my curiosity about the world beyond school. Even with their influence, my social side would be slow to develop, as would my awareness of the impact I can have on other people. But that has come with age, with experience, with children, and I'm better for it. I wish it had come sooner, even if I wouldn't trade the brain I was given for anything...
I will never have my father's calm bearing, but he instilled in me a fundamental sense of confidence and capability. My mother's influence was more complex. Internalized by me, her expectations bloomed into an even stronger ambition to succeed, to stand out and to do something important. It was as if I needed to clear my mom's bar by such a wide margin that there would be nothing left to say on the matter. But, of course, there was always something more to be said. It was my mother who regularly reminded me that I was merely a steward of any wealth I gained. With wealth came the responsibility to give it away, she would tell me. ... [>>>]

The EFF has complained that in general "smart" products for babies "collect a ton of information about you and your baby on an ongoing basis". (For this year's "worst in privacy" product at CES they chose a $1,200 baby bassinet equipped with a camera, a microphone, and a radar sensor...)

But today the Washington Post reported on a $1,700 bassinet that surprised the mother of a one-month-old when it "abruptly demanded money for a feature she relied on to soothe her baby to sleep."

The internet-connected bassinet... reliably comforted her 1-month-old — just as it had her first child — until it started charging $20 a month for some abilities, including one that keeps the bassinet's motion and sounds at one level all night. The level-lock feature previously was available without a fee. "It all felt really intrusive — like they went into our bedroom and clawed back this feature that we've been depending on...." When the Snoo's maker, Happiest Baby, introduced a premium subscription for some of the bassinet's most popular features in July, owners filed dozens of complaints to the Federal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau, coordinated review bombs and vented on social media — saying the company took advantage of their desperation for sleep to bait-and-switch them...

Happiest Baby isn't the only baby gear company that has rolled out a subscription. In 2023, makers of the Miku baby monitor, which retails for up to $400, elicited similar fury from parents when it introduced a $10 monthly subscription for most features. A growing number of internet-connected products have lost software support or functionality after purchase in recent years, such as Spotify's Car Thing — a $90 Bluetooth streaming device that the company announced in May it plans to discontinue — and Levi's $350 smart jacket, which let users control their phones by swiping sensors on its sleeve...

Seventeen consumer protection and tech advocacy groups cited Happiest Baby and Car Thing in a letter urging the FTC to create guidelines that ensure products retain core functionality without the imposition of fees that did not exist when the items were originally bought. ... [>>>]

"Looking for a quick fix for their fast-growing electricity diets, tech giants are increasingly looking to strike deals with power plant owners to plug in directly," reports the Associated Press, "avoiding a potentially longer and more expensive process of hooking into a fraying electric grid that serves everyone else." (It can take up to four years to connect a data center to the grid, one data center trade group says in the article — years longer than it takes to build a new data center.)

But the idea of bypassing the grid is "raising questions over whether diverting power to higher-paying customers will leave enough for others and whether it's fair to excuse big power users from paying for the grid."

Front and center is the data center that Amazon's cloud computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, is building next to the Susquehanna nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania. The arrangement between the plant's owners and AWS — called a "behind the meter" connection — is the first such to come before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. For now, FERC has rejected a deal that could eventually send 960 megawatts — about 40% of the plant's capacity — to the data center. That's enough to power more than a half-million homes... [But the FERC's 2-1 rejection "was procedural. Recent comments by commissioners suggest they weren't ready to decide how to regulate such a novel matter without more study."]

In theory, the AWS deal would let Susquehanna sell power for more than they get by selling into the grid... The profit potential is one that other nuclear plant operators, in particular, are embracing after years of financial distress and frustration with how they are paid in the broader electricity markets. Many say they have been forced to compete in some markets against a flood of cheap natural gas as well as state-subsidized solar and wind energy. Power plant owners also say the arrangement benefits the wider public, by bypassing the costly buildout of long power lines and leaving more transmission capacity on the grid for everyone else... ... [>>>]

At December's "Microsoft Excel World Championship" in Las Vegas, "finance professionals fluent in spreadsheets were treated like minor celebrities," writes the New York Times, "as they gathered to solve devilishly complex Excel puzzles in front of an audience of about 400 people, and more watching an ESPN3 livestream."

The Times notes that "many fans find out about the Excel championship through ESPN's annual obscure sports showcase, where it is sandwiched between competitions like speed chess and the World Dog Surfing Championships." But the contest's organizer envisions tournaments with "more spectators, bigger sponsors and a million-dollar prize" — even though this year's prize was $5,000 and a pro wrestling-style championship belt.

The format for the finals was a mock-up of World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game. It required the 12 men (this particular nerdfest was mostly a guy thing) to design Excel formulas for tracking 20 avatars and their vital signs... To prepare, [competitor Diarmuid] Early adjusted the width of his Excel columns with the precision of a point guard lining up a 3-point shot. [Andrew] Ngai queued up a YouTube compilation of "focus music". After an announcer kicked off the 40-minute event — "Five, four, three, two, one, and Excel!" — the 12 players leaned over their keyboards and began plugging in formulas. One example: "=CountChar (Lower (D5),"W")" allowed one competitor, Michael Jarman, to figure out how many times the letter "W" appeared in a spreadsheet.

ZDNet points out that there's a seven-hour livestream of the event that's "worth checking out for the opening theme song alone."

The New York Times closes their article with a quote from super-fan Erik Oehm, a software developer from San Francisco who called the event "the Super Bowl for Excel nerds". Oehm watched excitedly from the front row as this year's winner — Michael Jarman — finally raised the championship belt overhead while someone dumped glitter on him. And then he said... ... [>>>]